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The Regent Theatre was built in 1929 to operate both as a theatre and a cinema, on a block of land which has a narrow corridor-like frontage to Queen Street and a broad frontage to Elizabeth Street. The shape of the block determined the basic plan of the theatre. The auditorium was on the broad part of the site and the narrow section was given over to the foyers. This made good economic sense as the rent for the Queen Street frontage –which gave the prestigious Queen Street address – was lower than that for Elizabeth Street; but it also allowed the original architects, Richard Gailey (based in Brisbane) and Chas. Hollingshed (the Regent Theatre company's own architect based in Melbourne) to lavish extraordinary attention upon the foyer and to form an extremely rich and fantastic "rite of passage" between the outside world and the world of the theatre. There was a sequence of spaces, each more richly decorated than the last, and separated by staircases, which led finally to the auditorium. These spaces were, and remain, in a fantasy "gothic" mode and the original auditorium was decorated in a similar fantastic way. Theatre and cinema going in the 1920's and 30's was very much an escape from reality.
In the mid 1970's plans were made by Hoyts Theatres Limited to replace the old auditorium of the Regent Theatre in Queen Street, Brisbane, with a complex of four small cinemas in order to make the thing return a bigger profit. A controversy ensued with the arguments polarized between complete conservation on the one hand and complete redevelopment on the other. The National Trust, took up its position against the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline